What does it mean?
“My daughter has just told me they are a boy”?
“My son has just told me they are a girl”?
“My child has just told me they are non-binary”?
It can feel very confusing and distressing when your child ‘comes out’ and tells you they are transgender / non-binary. Please be assured, whatever you are feeling right now is ok and there is plenty of support available to help you through this journey.
What does it mean?
When we are born, doctors make decisions about our gender based on our genitals. We now know that someone’s gender is much more complex than that.
Everyone has an internal sense of their own gender identity and most of the time, our internal sense will match with the assumptions made about us at birth, but it doesn’t always. The assumptions made about trans / non-binary people at birth were incorrect, they were always the gender they are telling us they are – it is the assumptions made about them (based on their genitals) that were wrong.
Have a look at the genderbread person below to help explore biological sex versus gender identity.
Non-binary: a person who does not identify as either a man or a woman – sometimes the term gender neutral is used. Instead of using terms like she/her or he/him (pronouns) a non-binary person might prefer neutral terms such as they/them.
The ‘transgender umbrella’ image below is a helpful way to understand identities. Under the ‘trans umbrella’ there are binary identities as well as non-binary identities.
Don’t worry if you are finding this difficult to understand: for most of us the gender we were assigned at birth and our internal sense of our gender identity match up – so it’s extremely hard to imagine what it’s like or what it even means when they don’t match.
And it can be especially hard to try and understand non-binary identities as we are familiar with binary labels ‘male’ and ‘female’ whereas non-binary identities may feel very unfamiliar.
Why not watch this video (15 minutes) to hear from parents who have trans and non-binary children and their journey in learning about gender identities and supporting their children.
Proud Parent group member 2018:
“I didn’t see this coming and found it hard to believe. I have never stopped loving my child, they are still the same person inside. The challenges for me have been trying to accept that they felt they are transgender and adjusting to the differences in dress and appearance, along with remembering to use the correct pronouns.”
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